


cold hands (warm heart)

by honey_wheeler



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Future Fic, Marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-02
Updated: 2012-07-02
Packaged: 2017-11-09 00:41:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/449333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is not the man who was her husband. Nor is he the boy who might have been her betrothed. They were handsome men each when they lived, russet-haired with eyes like the sky, mannered and polite and courteous. Jon Snow is far from mannered, and he is only as polite and courteous as a truly kind man needs be. It’s been Roslin’s experience that the prettier the manners, the uglier the heart, and no one could accuse Jon Snow of having pretty manners. But a pretty face he has, and Roslin can’t complain that he’s hard to look upon or even hard to be with, despite his lack of refinement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cold hands (warm heart)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hesperia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hesperia/gifts).



> Post-series, spoilers specifically through ASoS.

He is not the man who was her husband. Nor is he the boy who might have been her betrothed. They were handsome men each when they lived, russet-haired with eyes like the sky, mannered and polite and courteous. Jon Snow is far from mannered, and he is only as polite and courteous as a truly kind man needs be. It’s been Roslin’s experience that the prettier the manners, the uglier the heart, and no one could accuse Jon Snow of having pretty manners. But a pretty face he has, and Roslin can’t complain that he’s hard to look upon or even hard to be with, despite his lack of refinement.

Winterfell is more than cold. Roslin hadn’t known such cold existed, though she’d heard tales same as any child in the south, stories of snow drifts taller than a man and icy winds that could freeze the sheep where they stood. Jon had offered Lady Stark’s chambers to her when she’d arrived, claiming they were the warmest – he’d had new furniture made, even, lovely dark wood pieces carved with vines and blossoms – but she remembered Catelyn Stark too well from the scant hours she’d known the woman to ever be comfortable in her rooms. 

“I’d not be able to sleep here without remembering that I lay with her brother as she died,” Roslin had told him bluntly, perhaps hoping to shock him, or perhaps only hoping to ameliorate her own ever-present guilt at having been a part of such a thing by putting it to voice. But Jon had only given her a soft, pained look, raising one cautious hand as if to touch her shoulder before dropping it to his side in a fist. Only hours later, the carved furniture had been in the room she chose, surely on his orders, and she’d kissed him in thanks, the first time she’d done such a thing since their marriage ceremony, feeling something she thought had died long ago fluttering in her heart at the blush creeping over his cheeks.

The furniture looks beautiful in her rooms, the bed solid and comfortable. The vines put her in mind of the creepers that grow wild along the banks of the rivers near her home, and they make her feel a sweet sort of nostalgia for the place she couldn’t wait to leave and would never return to even now. She likes her bed especially, likes it well enough that after she goes to his rooms one night almost half a year into their marriage to seduce him, she asks him to come back to her chambers instead, wanting to lie in that bed with the vines and flowers as her second husband gives her his cock and his seed, just as he’d given her a home.

He is not an easy man to seduce. For months she’d thought he didn’t desire her, and perhaps did not desire women at all. But he’d not shown any interest in the men of the House, not even the pretty boy Satin who had come with him from the Wall and who shows unmistakable interest in Jon no matter how blind Jon is to it, and he made no lengthy trips into the village that might have been telling. Roslin holds no illusions; she knows she is a pretty woman to most, and beautiful to many. It’s no accomplishment to be beautiful, though, nothing to truly recommend her. Pretty faces could be like pretty manners, after all, only wrappers for ugly hearts. But never had a man displayed so little interest in her, and it had been discomfiting and not a little confusing. It was only after she had brushed against his side by chance and felt him jerk and shiver that she’d realized he only held his desire below the surface, protecting her from himself in a way no man Roslin had ever known before would have considered. After that, she’d seen the dark attention of his eyes, she’d heard his voice grow rough and low when she wore a gown with a bodice grown a bit too tight. She’d seen all the little pieces of his desire shining through his shell like light through a cracked vase, and had wondered that she’d not seen them before. Like everything else here in the North, she’d had to learn to look at things a bit differently to see them true.

Edmure had not been a selfish lover, but Jon is something else entirely. He does not merely touch her body, but worships it, mapping every bit of her skin with fingers and lips and tongue, exploring her mouth until she knows his taste as well as her own. He pushes her teats about his face to cover his cheeks, drops his mouth between her legs to sup upon her for what seems like hours, drawing peak after peak from her and still not ceasing the needy, devastating motion of his lips and tongue. She can barely move when he finally gives her his cock, coaxing one more burst of pleasure from her body with his fingers before jerking and spending inside her, her name sweet and rough on his lips.

“Why did you not lie with me earlier?” she asks when she has him sated and sprawled heavy atop her, his breath at her throat raising gooseflesh across her neck. “Why did you hide your desire?” He buries his head in her breasts, his cheeks hot against her skin, and makes an unsure sound.

“I did not wish to force you,” he says when he raises his head at last, looking at her with eyes that are gentle despite the need in them. “You have been through enough. I wanted you to feel safe with me.” There is no lie in his words. She holds them close to her, tucks them away inside and knows she’ll take them out to look at often, to give her this sweet, warm feeling that steals through her body at his care for a woman he’d barely known.

“I _am_ safe with you,” she tells him, and she can tell by the shudder of his heart against hers that he’ll tuck away her words just the same.


End file.
